HolyDuckTurtle @ HolyDuckTurtle @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

I do not believe it to be an outright scam. However, it is horribly managed and I do consider the funding model to be predatory.

The whole "pledge" store should not be a thing at this stage IMO. It's just a cash shop they can justify huge prices with. It's actively contributed to the scope creep by introducing new vehicle roles, which they sometimes admit to not having designed gameplay for yet. Nor does it currently tell you if you can actually rent or buy the ship in-game (subject to progress wipes). Heck, the closest thing to a scam they've had recently was a "new starter bundle" of in-game gear that you lose upon your first death / unrecoverable body. This is a game where 80% of your deaths are to bugs or unintuitive behaviour.

They also keep trying to change their standards to match modern games. Ships have gone through multiple reworks which take months for a single ship. A sensible dev would lock that in and commit to releasing under those standards. It's been pointed out that with the current rate of progress, they'll still be releasing currently announced ships into the 2030s.

That's not even mentioning the single player component, Squadron 42, which got indefinitely delayed a few years back before a major demo showcase which never materialised. Supposedly, it's been scrapped and re-done more than once.

Their last big chance to show they've pulled things together is going to be the upcoming CitizenCon (yes, it has one) where they'll supposedly be making a big Squadron 42 announcement. A former customer service employee, who recently criticised the company's spending practices, claimed they'd taken a much more serious approach to the scope creep and that we'd see some results of that towards the end of this year.

I'm not holding my breath though. They've been known to create bullshit for presentations before (e.g the infamous sand worm) and I absolutely would not be surprised if Chris Roberts feels pressured to one-up Starfield.

As a side note, does anyone else get the impression this article was written by an AI? It repeatedly lists of buzzword features, like the Hangar module which hasn't been relevant for years, and barely discusses what the game is actually like.

Yeah, in particular them saying now "You will keep the license of the version you use" rings very hollow when they literally showed they can retract that whenever they want ANd get a lawyer to defend that move in no uncertain terms.

I've actually been really enjoying it. It's a pleasant universe to just get absorbed in.

Sure, it's got a lot of very valid complaints (performance, UX etc.) but they matter less to me the more I get into it. Writing is not groundbreaking, but it gets pretty good. Since very good voice acting from otherwise random NPCs.

Also the first game I've played that lets me use non-binary pronouns as a third option, rather than just Gendered or not. Very cool and I hope to see more games do that.

I'd say the most disappointing thing is how straightforward almost every quest is. They don't do what Obsidian does in games like New Vegas and Outer Worlds where lots of quests have multiple resolutions, some hidden. In this game if it's not in the objective list it's usually not an option. It's the typical Bethesda experience of course, rather than Obsidian's, so it's still nice for what it is.

It's the closest I've personally felt to exploring and interacting with the worlds of Mass Effect 1 and Knights of the Old Republic in a long time. It's got that sense of wander about it for me.

I hear Godot's own scripting language is preferable to C# if you're willing to learn it.

Yeah the base colour tones are absolutely nuts. I spent a lot of time on launch just trying to figure out if my HDR display was bugging out or something.

Very weird how those were absent from release, but I'm glad they're getting added. Good to see I'm not the only one who found the lack of an "eat" alt-option annoying as well!

That's about his theory of Radiant Energy, not lightning strikes.

Even though it was developed by a different team, they did capture the general charm IMO. The story and characters aren't terrible, some of it I really loved. Like Inquisition and Anthem, it was primarily let down by a lot of management and studio culture issues which have been made very public.

In my view, Dreadwolf is their opportunity to show if they've managed to overcome those callenges or has sucumbed to them forever. I am made hopeful by what appears to have been a well-scoped and managed project in the Mass Effect Legendary Edition.

This sounds very useful, I wonder to what extent federated platforms like ours can make use of it? It sounds as if apps will need to specially deisgned around it, given it presents challenges to traditional moderation of things like DMs between users.

I hope so. My fear is after seeing what the fossil fuel industries did to stop alternatives from arising, that they will embark on a new campaign to undermine this for as long as possible.

The article and social media response highlights a few problems. Chiefly, that high speed E-bikes are effectively moped-class vehicles that people are riding as if they are bicycles.

And by that, I mean they can be ridden very dangerously. Such as on a pavement or other pedestrian zones where people do not reasonably expect a fast and quiet vehicle to be present.

I've been learning how to ride a bicycle lately as an adult, and I have rapidly gotten the impression that education around bicycle laws is lacking. Because it is actually illegal to ride a bicycle on pavement that is not marked for such use. People either don't know, are uncertain, or willingly use a pavement anyway for conveniance because nobody prosecutes for it. So many cyclists use pavement that for all my life I thought it was normal and allowed.

Cyclists who take that behaviour into an E-bike and use it the same way, especially at high speed (modified or not), present a significant risk to everyone involved. I find the following statement perfectly reasonable:

Sergeant Gareth Davies said: "While it's not illegal to own an e-bike with an electrical assistance or power output exceeding 25 kph and 250W respectively, you can't ride it on the public highway as a regular bike without registering and insuring it like a moped.

The assertion that most of them siezed in the article appear to be from food delivery drivers is interesting because it speaks to a greater issue in that industry. That the results we're seeing here could be driven by unreasonable work expectations and poor pay, encouraging these workers to use E-bikes as a cheap and hassle-free way to do their work. You can see that in how some respond to this issue with comments like:

One person commented: "Targeting hardworking people just trying to get by, well done."
Another added: "This is so hard to look at. These people are trying to earn a living and get £3 per delivery and you do this? This is vile and disgusting!"

I can agree with that sentiment, E-biking should not be targeted unreasonably. They are a good tool for when a regular bicycle does not fit your needs for whatever reason. Just so long as, like all vehicles, they are ridden safely and responsibly.

I've been learning to ride a bicycle for the my new work commute and have been brushing up on the laws and highway code. I was kind of shocked to learn riding on pavements is indeed illegal unless a sign specifies, since you see people do it all the time with no consequences.

I agree that E-assist bikes that don't exceed normal cycle speeds should likely be left alone (general education on cycling needs improvement but that's another matter) and the modified / faster ones absolutely need more scrutiny and possibly a motorcycle license or equivilent.

EDIT: Classic didn't read the article moment:

Police say it is illegal to ride the bikes without a licence, insurance and vehicle tax and that they are classed as motorcycles.

Sergeant Gareth Davies said: "While it's not illegal to own an e-bike with an electrical assistance or power output exceeding 25 kph and 250W respectively, you can't ride it on the public highway as a regular bike without registering and insuring it like a moped.
"This includes both off-road and road rights, such as byways and bridleways. You can only ride unregistered and uninsured electric bikes on private land with the landowner’s permission.

There's also the simple social factor which gets underestimated. I used to get worked up at work when people would ask questions about stuff I had written documentation about, until I understood that some folk just want that little social connection. They want a person to communicate something to them, whether they're concsiously aware of it or not.

It's also fairly common for people to just not be that good at searching for things. You have to word things in specific ways and learn what kind of sources to avoid and ones to trust. So asking people who do can be a huge timesaver.

Or worse, find a way to use "The Final Season" thematically in the narrative to retroactively look like they planned it all along (unless this is already explicit in the manga).

Either way, their use of "parts" since Season 3 has been super annoying and misleading. I hope nobody pulls this shit again.

According to the article:

Irdeto has a plan, however: a program that will offer media outlets two versions of games to benchmark independently, with and without Denuvo Anti-Tamper, which he believes will prove "the performance is comparable, identical" between both. Apparently they hope to begin it within the next few months.

To me, this is a pretty good way of going about it. It gives people with professional and established testing methodology access to make the comparisons. Basically a "see for yourself" approach where its impact (or ideally, the lack of it) can be tested per-game.

One of the big problems historically with pre and post denuvo-removal comparisons is time. Casual benchmarkers run tests between older versions with DRM vs new versions without, which obviously have recieved a bunch of other optimizations. Some people don't even re-run the old tests, which brings their own system differences into the equation (e.g. BIOS and driver updates). Nor is testing between cracked / non-cracked versions perfect; DRM that's been circumvented is not necessarily prevented from running at all.

This is important to get right because, not only does actually good data take a LOT of work that casual benchmarkers wouldn't even think of, there aren't many definitive answers as to Denuvo's universal effect on games. Sometimes it appears to have had no effect, then sometimes it does, which may be related to different generations of it and how well the devs implement it on a per-game basis.

An example the article gives is [PCGamer] hiring Durante (a prolific PC modder and developer famous for their work on Dark Souls) to benchmark Final Fantasy 15 with and without, finding no definitive measurable difference in gameplay but a possible 6.7% increase in load times.

The question I have though is whether Denuvo themselves offer these versions or if it's a program whereby every game with it is obligated to provide these versions to press. In the case of the former, Denuvo would likely have the power to only show off best-case scenarios, whatever the conditions for that may be. If the latter, we may get a positive effect whereby, if they don't already, Denuvo's contract with a dev requires that their implementation is done properly and meets their standards, otherwise they don't allow it. As a company, they do seem hung up on the perception of performance issues, so it wouldn't surprise me.

Putting on a tin-foil hat, if they're really scummy they could deliberately impose a performance limit on the non-Denuvo version. Say, something that is designed explicitly to mimic its runtime behaviour. That would be pretty insane though, not only is that tactic likely illegal, it wouldn't take much for it to become public. It would be a significant risk given how confident they are in its lack of performance impacts (which as we've said, appear to be backed by professional testing). If they're working to resolve their PR problems, it would be an utterly stupid thing to do.

Overall though, I look forward for what this means for testing going forward. Frustrations about DRM aside (I much prefer without for a number of reasons) from a technical level I'm interested in whether this approach will prove the performance impacts a myth or not. Either way, it'll give us more insight into how it actually works and what it's doing under the hood.